Stephen Jay Greenblatt (b. 1943) is a literary critic/theorist often seen as the leader of the school known as New Historicism (though Greenblatt has said he prefers the term "cultural poetics"). His area of specialty is the early modern/Renaissance period. He has written extensively on William Shakespeare and is general editor of The Norton Shakespeare, a widely used college textbook.

Greenblatt was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He studied at Yale (B.A. 1964, M.Phil 1968, Ph.D. 1969) and Cambridge (A.B. 1966, M.A. 1968).

Greenblatt has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. He is a founding editor of the scholarly journal Representations has served as president of the Modern Language Association (MLA).

Awards

• Fulbright scholarship (1964-66)
• Guggenheim fellowship (1975)

Major works

• Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1984)
• Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1989)
• Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (1992)
• Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1992)
• Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (1992)
• Practicing New Historicism (with Catherine Gallagher)(2001)
• Hamlet in Purgatory (2002)
• Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004)
• The Greenblatt Reader (forthcoming February 2005)